When we spoke with Picnik co-founder Mike Harrington a few months ago, he told us that the site would eventually have two tiers: a free image editing service, and a subscription version with more features. This week, Picnik officially launched its paid service, for $25 per year.

Paid subscribers get access to extra editing tools, effects, shapes, and fonts. The free service also got an update this week, with Photobucket support. Here's some of the new features available to paid users:

• Photobucket support - edit photos from Photobucket and/or save your images to the site
• Effect painting - choose certain effects and apply them with brush strokes
• New effects including invert, pencil sketch, and pixelate
• Add shapes, symbols, or speech bubbles
• Touch up tool for whitening teeth or removing zits (from photos, not real life)
• New image frames

$25 a year seems like a pretty decent price to pay when you consider how much professional editing software like Photoshop can set you back. And because Picnik is completely web-based, the company can continue to roll out new features for paid users without asking you to upgrade.

Eventually some of those new features will probably make their way to the free version as well. But you get what you pay for, and Picnik will most likely be using its free site to promote its paid services.

[via WebWare]